[TheOtherHobbes]

He's strangely breezy about the whole thing.

'...a short jail stint in one’s past for “soliciting prostitution” simply doesn’t sound disqualifying, according to the secular liberal morality that most academics hold, unless you researched the details, which most didn’t.'

Uh. Really?

[canjobear]

He's criticizing other people's attitudes there, not stating his own.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Really. If you polled a random selection of academics, I'm confident you'd find that a majority of them consider soliciting prostitution to be somewhere between "shouldn't even be illegal" and "bar fight".

(I repeat for emphasis, since I know people will bring it up if I don't, that the ages of the people Epstein solicited and the circumstances under which he solicited them were not as widely known at the time.)

[TimorousBestie]

Scott’s experience burning most of his friendship bridges over Israel/Palestine has left him with a cynical image of academia.

“Secular liberal morality” here plays the same role as “cultural Marxism” elsewhere: neither exists concretely as an actual entity, but if you abstract away enough of the details you can still point to it like a bogeyman or a cryptid.